Max fixing scam unveiled in Telegraph. They are investigating unexplained betting patterns in the Asian market, revealed in the Sunday Telegraph two weeks ago, on the Oct 4 game between Norwich City and Derby County. Apparently an England game when under Erriksson was also fixed, a few big world cup games & some in the Olympics. Only part of the story is on the below link but theres a full spread in todays paper. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/32...ing-claims-taint-2006-World-Cup-Football.html Edit: Heres the rest of the write up. There have been youth games in Scotland monitored by gamblers; there have been strange, unexplained odds movements in top English matches, but the reach of the fixers may be much higher. It may have spread to the very top of the sport – to matches at the World Cup. It began on the night of Nov 25, 2005. I received a call that I had been waiting months for: a senior Asian match-fixer agreed to an interview. As an investigative journalist and doctoral student at the University of Oxford, I was doing research into the Asian gambling market and the fixers who worked in it. I had interviewed players, referees, sports officials, police and prosecutors. Most of them had warned me to leave the subject alone. The people who ran the fixes were very dangerous men. And that night, one of them – who I will call “Chin Lee” – had agreed to talk to me. On the phone he summoned me to his country club. I went alone. I have worked in Kosovo, Iraq and I have interviewed Russian mobsters and North American Mafiosi, but this was the most frightening. I had been working for months in Asia. I knew that some of the people I spoke to worked for Chin. I just did not know what he thought of my work. Now he wanted to meet me alone. Corrupt I stood outside his door willing myself to go on. Then I knocked. An Asian man opened the door and I went inside. In the room were two men, and a beautiful woman lying – fully clothed – on the bed. There were two phones on the table. During the meeting I was not threatened in any way. But it was the most extraordinary conversation I have ever had. As we talked, the phone rang every three or four minutes. Chin would answer it and he told me he was either fixing games or had information of fixes happening in the football tournament of the South-East Asian Games (a kind of regional mini-Olympics) and a German Bundesliga match that was being played at that moment. To establish his credibility, Chin told me the score of the German game before it started. However, that was not his biggest boast. Chin claimed that he could get players to fix matches in any league or tournament in the world. Not every match in any league, nor any player, he stressed, but he said he could corrupt some players in any league. “What was the biggest match you have ever fixed?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied, “The Olympics? The World Cup? Which is bigger?” I did not believe him. It simply seemed too bizarre, too far-fetched, too impossible that a match at the World Cup finals or even the Olympics could be fixed. I told him so. He seemed insulted that I was sceptical, so he said: “Watch while I do it.” I left that night with my head in a whirl. My scepticism was matched by my confusion, for the German game had ended as Chin predicted. (A year later German police officers would discover that a convicted Asian match-fixer, William Lim, had made more than €2.3 million correctly predicting the result of this match and two months ago, German football authorities claimed that they had launched “a serious investigation” into the match). Ten days after our interview, the football tournament of the SEA Games was found to have been fixed and eight Vietnam players were convicted of rigging games. At that point, I was also not entirely sure why Chin was telling me these secrets. At one point, he was interested in me writing a book on him, but that idea quickly died when I explained how little money he could make compared to his regular occupation of fixing matches. But even after that he continued to let me into meetings In the end, I think I understand why he was so confident, for very little is ever done against match-fixers, even after they have been exposed. Strategy Over the next few months, he brought me into a series of meetings with other Asian fixers and gamblers. One in particular was important. It happened on May 25, 2006, in a fast-food restaurant where a runner for the syndicate was brought to discuss strategy before the World Cup finals. He was an African with the tough, hard body of a professional athlete. He was supposed to be a coach of an under-17 African national team. A man who Chin claimed knew everyone in football in his country, who could meet the players and get the fixers access to them. And Chin and his group negotiated with them. I watched this meeting. I heard what Chin told me, but I had no idea if any of it was true. The idea of a fix at a World Cup tournament seemed so monstrously large that the story must be false. However, there are a few conditions that I did not know then, that may make a difference in evaluating the case. First, at almost every large international football tournament from the under-17s to the Women’s World Cup to the World Cup, Asian fixers have been approaching players and teams. They do so for two reasons. First, the money placed in the gambling market on games in these tournaments is so large that they are, ironically, easier to fix than a match in a smaller league. Secondly, what may make some players potentially open to corruption is that international football, compared to many European leagues, is relatively badly off. For example, in 2001, the Ghanaian Football Association were so hard up for cash that, after losing a World Cup qualifying match to Nigeria (Ghana were already out of the qualification, but the Nigeria victory meant they went to the finals in South Korea and Japan, while Liberia did not) the then-president of the GFA accepted a gift of $25,000 from the Nigerians. When critics questioned this decision, his reply was, in essence, 'what are you complaining about? I shared the money with everyone. All the players and journalists got some cash’. Fifa later investigated this incident and announced that there was no problem and that any controversy came from a cultural misunderstanding. This lack of wealth is particularly hard at international tournaments, when so many people are watching and there is so much sponsorship money. At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the Ghana players had two heated meetings with their officials over pay. The squabble was defused only by a high-level Ghanaian politician. There was a strike by the Togo players, who refused to play a game until their pay was guaranteed by Fifa. And each of the Trinidad and Tobago players received only $500 for their image rights. This does not mean that those players fixed games, but it does mean that financial conditions that fans come to expect in a league like the English Premier League are not necessarily there in internationals. It is this gap that may make it easier for fixers to work at these tournaments. I went to an African team camp in Germany during the World Cup for six days. I met many of the players and officials. I heard the players sing hymns. I thought they were likeable, decent and honest. I saw no sign of the man I had seen in an Asian fast-food restaurant a few weeks before. And I would have been happy to dismiss Chin’s entire story as a fabrication, except for the phone calls. Every few days, Chin and I would speak on the phone. He gave me the gossip behind the purported deal and then told me the essential result of four games at the World Cup finals before they took place. One day, he told me that a fix was 100 per cent confirmed for a game between a team playing against an African side. “[X] is going to win?” I asked. “No, [the African side] will lose,” he replied, “They will do the business with [X].” I want to stress that on no occasion did any fixer say that all the players on the team were fixing. Rather, it was purported that it would be a small group of players. I watched the game with great curiosity. Would Chin’s prediction be right or would the game be much closer? In the end, the score matched what was needed on the Asian gambling market. However, it was not just the result, it was the manner of the game. It seemed to me that there was something odd about the match. The goals were pathetic; the kind that a youth team would be ashamed to give away. I was sure at the time that there was something wrong. I then went to the country and found the man who I had last seen in an Asian fast food restaurant. He was actually pretty easy to find. Why? Because his photo was on the front cover of the national newspaper – for having fixed a match of the national team. Pressure The pressures that African countries are under was hammered home to me when, a few months later, Ghana’s Stephen Appiah, the country’s captain and talismanic leader, made an astonishing confession to me. He confirmed he had been approached by a fixer during the 2006 World Cup tournament. Appiah said he immediately turned down the offer. But he had known this particular fixer for several years. The fixer, and others like him, go to many of the international tournaments that Appiah has played at. In the 2004 Olympics, Appiah had taken $20,000 from the fixer for wining a game and then had distributed the money around the team. I phoned Appiah a few months later to check these details. He again confirmed everything, adding only that when they received the money at the Olympics, he had waited until after the game to make sure that there was no ambiguity from the fixers. They win, they get paid, no other stuff going on. Appiah may not have known, but his accepting of money from an outside source is, according to Sepp Blatter, whom I also interviewed, against Fifa’s regulations. However, Appiah and many other African players said the fixers do go to different teams at all the big international football tournaments. Other officials, players, and the fixers themselves agree, organised crime gamblers do regularly approach teams to fix games at international tournaments such as the World Cup. They are able to do so relatively easily. The question is: who is trying to stop them? The England Game The following is an extract from Declan Hill’s The Fix, where Hill is speaking to a fixer. They discuss the game between an African country and another team (X) and then move on to talk about one of England’s games at World Cup 2006. The fixer suggests that England’s opponents were supposed to throw the game but struggled to do so because of the ineptitude of Sven-Goran Eriksson’s side… June 2006 Chin: Yeah, yeah, my friend told me. But they called me and they are interested in doing the [African nation] and [X] game. Hill: [X] is going to win? Chin: No, [African] will lose. They will do the business with [X]. Hill: Really? Chin: Yes, it is confirmed. Hill: Confirmed, confirmed? Chin: Absolutely. 100 per cent confirmed. They say against [X] they really want to do the business. Hill: I don’t understand why they would want to do that? They get paid by their football association. Chin: Yeah. [laughs] But you know, sometimes in football, there are players… they will do the business… But today the same guy told me that they arranged the game with [Y] against England. [England] to win. 2-0. Hill: Yeah, I don’t know, I am watching the game here, and England look as if they are much worse than [Y]. [Y] looks very good. Chin: Yes, England is very very bad... It is a ––––––-up arrangement, you know. Hill: But I think the [African]-[X] one we have more information on. We have people inside the camp. We are more certain about that… Chin: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s true. Author’s note: I remain uncertain of whether the England game was corrupted, knowing no other details. But I include this conversation because of the public right to know.
